Hello Mafia 1 modders and fans. First off I'm wondering if people still play and mod this game? This site and many modders' YT channels and webpages went kind of silent since 2015.

Anyway, to my question - I know you can change the texture by replacing it in the "maps" directory, but that changes it for all the missions that use it. What I would like to do is to change the texture which an individual mission loads.
In the tutorial mission, there is this "back" entity. If you play with it, changing colors and brightness, the sky changes accordingly. But I was not able to find the path to the texture in order to change it.
Any ideas?

You need to find the sky box frame (that is a model) in the mission. Just check all the frames in MWE - delete every frame till you reach the point when the sky disappears, take one step back (I believe that is not possible in MWE, so remember the position of the frame in the list or something) and remember the name of the frame, overload the mission and find the sky box frame and edit its properties, the model it uses in particular (rename it) - you can choose any skybox you want. You can find the names of skyboxes in one russian props shower kind of program which you must have come across if you have been modding Mafia for a longer time, dunno what it is called nomore.

In DC||ED, you can look at the Objects>Model Objects dropdown menu and the skybox model is usually named something like 'denjasmo', 'zapad' or 'o_m_xxxxxx' (or 'nocazetno' if it's the nighttime skybox)._________________

Just check all the frames in MWE - delete every frame till you reach the point when the sky disappears, take one step back (I believe that is not possible in MWE, so remember the position of the frame in the list or something) and remember the name of the frame, overload the mission and find the sky box frame and edit its properties, the model it uses in particular (rename it) - you can choose any skybox you want.

Actually you don't need to delete frames. Frames selected from the frame list are rendered accordingly in the scene view so you just need to iterate the list and stop once the desired object (i.e. the skybox in this case) turns up red in the scene view.

That being said I have to admit that selection of Backdrop sector objects is not particularly well solved in MWE.